Last night, McCain announced his run for the White House on Letterman- further proving that Republicans are ignoring the viability of outreach on the internet. With Hillary, Obama, and Edwards all announcing their bids on the net, one has to wonder why McCain failed to use this route.

Monday’s Post contained a chart showing the number of friends the ’08 frontrunners have on MySpace, as tallied by techpresident.com. The painstaking data collection that went into this analysis aside, I don’t think it is of any consequence that Obama has blown both Hilary and Edwards out of the water. However, I do think that the fact that none of the Republican candidates are even close is telling.

As I’ve discussed before, Republicans seem to be unwilling to really tap into the internet as a resource for their campaigns. They have websites, and blogs, and will launch online ad campaigns, but they are staunchly distancing themselves from web 2.0. Why? Perhaps because they are the ones that were burned the most by internet video in 2006. Or maybe they are confident that they are reaching the 18-24 demographic in other ways. Regardless, they are proving that they are comfortable being left behind here.